Israel

Middle Eastern Realities

Guest Commentary: Stop the Mullah Regime

The single biggest proliferator of venomous hatred being spewed at the world and anyone who does not practice Islam, infidels, is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. Ahmadinejad, known affectionately by Iranians as “The Monkey”, has revealed the true intentions of the Mullahs to the world. The Mullah Regime does not represent Iranians. They are a regime which oppresses and mercilessly kills Iranians who dare to stand up against it, and a regime which tries to replace any sense of Iranian nationhood with Islamic and Arabic values.

While one might dismiss Ahmadenijad’s provocative statements and actions as mere ludicrousness, it is important to note that during the rise of Adolph Hitler, the same stance was taken by the world community.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Mullah regime present a grave threat to the stability in Iran and the world. The “Iran Problem” is now a world problem.

That’s how Jimmy Carter recently described the Bush administration’s refusal to support Hamas and its terrorist campaign against the state of Israel. A curious lapse from a human-rights champion? Hardly.

As Jacob Laksin demonstrates in a new booklet, Jimmy Carter’s War Against the Jews, the ex-president’s reflexive sympathy for anti-Israel extremism is sadly typical of his career, both in and out of office. From the late PLO terrorist chieftain Yasir Arafat to the Saudi royals, Arab dictators and militants of every stripe could always count on Carter to spring to their defense against Israel and the West. By contrast, Israel, the Middle East’s sole democracy, is in Carter’s warped vision a racist “apartheid” state, as deserving of international censure as her terrorist enemies in Hamas are deserving of support.

It is Carter’s decades-long service in the propaganda war against the Jewish state that it is the subject of this booklet. To read it, Click Here.

Only traditional Islam can change Islam

The attempted bombings in London and the attack on Glasgow Airport last week underscore the continued and long-term Islamic terror threat that Britain and the world is facing. To date, all of those detained are highly educated foreign-born medical staff.

Far from being affronted by this incursion, young British Muslims are increasingly likely to support domestic jihad. The radicalization of British Muslim youth proceeds apace. According to a recent poll by Populus, growing numbers of Muslims aged 16-30 subscribe to extreme versions of Islam, and almost 40 percent want to live under Shariah law. Britain faces the prospect of a whole new generation of young people embracing extremism and religious fanaticism.

So far, the government has refrained from introducing more Draconian legislation. Instead, Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his ministerial colleagues have promised to reinforce the government’s campaign “to win the hearts and minds of the Muslim community.”

However, like Tony Blair’s sterile appeal to moderate, mainstream Islam, this strategy is bound to fail because of two fatal assumptions.

First, that every culture and every religion wants to become like the secular West.Second, resistance to Western secularization is fueled by false grievances and as such can be legitimately ignored.

In practice, this sort of approach marginalizes traditional Islam in favor of an ersatz “progressive” version that robs it of all its distinctive character and vision. The litmus test for integration is whether Muslims are willing to be like “us.” Unsurprisingly, many young Muslims are increasingly alienated by an aggressively secular culture that enforces liberal transgression of moral norms and taboos.

Crucially, current policies are not working because they fail to address the real cause of radicalization and fanaticism. Contemporary Islamic violence is religious in nature. Its origin lies in Islamic scripture and the destruction of the traditional medieval schools that dictated its interpretation.

The Koran contains clear and lethal injunctions against apostates, idolaters and those who challenge Muslim territorial ascendancy. While the sacred texts do sanctify violence – they also codify it, limiting its range and application.

Thus, there is no legitimation in classical Islam for suicide bombing or the wanton slaughter of innocents. [I am sure this opinion is far from universal.]That said, warfare and a consequent defense and extension of Islam was both a religious duty and a scriptural requirement, albeit one framed by chivalry and relative restraint.

Moreover, unlike the claims of contemporary fundamentalists, there never really was a unified political/religious authority in Islam. On the contrary, the role of religious scholars (the ulama) was to limit the power of the caliphs.

And since there were four traditional schools of religious interpretation, which themselves varied according to time and location, what constituted a proper Islamic practice varied according to local norms and customs. As such traditional Islam prohibits the very totalitarian state Al Qaeda seeks to impose.

For example, if Islam recovers the traditional practice of ijtihad, a process of textual reinterpretation that replaces the scriptural literalism of the fundamentalists with a more medieval allegorical reading of the Koran, this would enable the Muslim faithful to distinguish between immutable God-given laws and mutable human interpretations.

It is worth stating all of this because the only force that can challenge Islamic terrorism is not liberal progressivism but Islam itself. Those who have abandoned terrorism did so not as a result of secular injunctions or indeed horror at what they were doing. Rather, it was the realization that the variant of Islam they were killing for was itself Western, modern and secular.

The great innovators of Islamic fundamentalism – Sayyid Qutb and Maulana Maududi – were deeply influenced by pagan Nazi literature and its supremacist critiques of modern life and culture. Demonstration of the essentially blasphemous nature of contemporary fundamentalism is crucial for the deprogramming of its adherents.

However, the mere rebirth of classical Islam is not enough. Islam in both its Sunni and Shiite derivations suffers from an absolutist unmediated relation to God. Since faith is separated from reason and nature it becomes a self-authenticating phenomenon that invalidates all other perspectives.

What is really required is the revival of Sufism – a practice previously common to all forms of the faith and one that stresses the mystical unknowable nature of God and His transcendence of all forms of human knowledge.

Such a recognition deprives Islamic fundamentalism of its primary motivating principle – that it knows the will of God and is therefore justified in enforcing it upon the earth.

A renewal of Sufism could help Islam to broaden its understanding of authority beyond rulers and the ulama to include civil society. This would also restore the consensus of the community (ijma). And thereby empower Muslim society to challenge the fundamentalist assertions of its heretical preachers with reasoned belief.

Given that we are losing the battle of hearts and minds, we would be well advised to chart a different path. By encouraging an Islamic renaissance and reviving traditions that the fundamentalists have so violently suppressed, Muslim youth might be diverted from their present course.

Phillip Blond is a senior lecturer in philosophy and religion at the University of Cumbria, Adrian Pabst is a lecturer in theology at the University of Nottingham.

Watch ‘Two Weeks in May’ about Sderot: It will make you angry!

by Jerry Gordon

Noam Bedein of the Sderot Media Center sent me his latest film: “Two Weeks in May’ about the intense Kassem barrage that occurred in Sderot. Watch this 11 minute film. It is powerful, devastating and emotional gripping.

Noam’s narrative is ‘impactful’ as one reviewer, Doris Wise of Los Angeles, said in an email to me about this latest production from the Sderot Media Center.

The images are enough to tear your hearts out: Sderot residents cowering, desperately scrambling to get what little protection they can in less than 15 seconds when the ‘seva adom’ or ‘Color Red’ alert sounds. You’ll see the destroyed synagogues, homes, lost and wrecked lives, the cries of ‘ima’ –mother- by terrified and traumatized children.

As you recover from watching this video, the emotion left is anger. Anger that a government of the State of Israel could let this happen to its own people, day in and day out, year after year. But what does it say about the people of Israel who would let this happen to their fellow citizens?

Something is dreadfully wrong in Israel and it has to be purged. We at Israpundit have been relentless in our pursuit of acknowledging this injustice to fellow Israeli citizens in Sderot time and again over the past several months. It is a ‘shander’- a shame to hear comments from Bedein in the narrative of this film that it is, “as if Sderot was not considered part of Israel”. A shander that two thirds of Sderot’s citizens had to be evacuated during the May Kassem barrages.

Now, there is silence, but the ‘color red ‘ alerts will sound again as Kassem rockets and perhaps worse will be launched from nearby Beit Hanoun and other locations in Gaza-Hamastan.

Israel has to stop the rocket attacks.

Israel needs to silence the ‘color red’ alerts forever, as the children of Sderot fervently hope.

The Olmert Kadima government is incompetent, shameless and the Israeli public who support this travesty by their silence are equally at fault.

What to do?

For a start, circulate this film’s weblink so that tens of thousands of consciences are seared, emotions are roused to confront the State of Israel and its representatives here in North America. They need to be reminded of this calumny, hourly, daily, week after week until the Kassem are silenced.

Then, those of you in Boston and New York should see and hear Noam Bedein and especially watch presentations by the Children of Sderot. A delegation of whom are at several summer camps in New England funded and sponsored by those ‘shtarkers‘ -heroes- of the Russian Jewish Community Foundation of Waltham, Massachusetts. Included in his terrific group are Rabbi Dan Rodkin of Shiloh House in Brighton, and indefatigable Cornell University student Masha Rifkin – a Sderot Media Center intern- and her mother Inna Rifkin.

Bedein will be arriving in the U.S. this week and will be speaking at the Clifton, NJ “Y” on Sunday, July 15th at 7:30PM in an event organized by activist Buddy Macy with the auspices of the local Federation.

We are also endeavoring to get Bedein on the platform at the ‘monster rally’ on Monday 16th at Dag Hammerskjold Plaza in Manhattan near UN headquarters sponsored by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, the United Jewish Communities – Jewish Federation of New York, and American Zionist Movement to demonstrate the solidarity of Sderot residents with the three kidnapped IDF Soldiers, Galid Shalit, Ehud Goldwasser, and Eldad Regev.

Later, on July 30th, the Sderot children will make a presentation and tell their painful stories at the Brooklyn College Hillel at 5:00PM. We hope that Mayor Bloomberg of New York, who visited Sderot in solidarity, will also receive a delegation of these children at City Hall in lower Manhattan visually communicating to a wide audience their travail.

Chaverim on the west coast are making preparations for similar events with city and state officials in Los Angeles, when Bedein is scheduled to travel west to tell the Sderot story in late August and early September.

Other chaverim are arranging for the transport of Kassem rocket wreckage from Israel to the US, design and deployment of a traveling multi-media exhibit. Fred Taub in Cleveland calls this traveling exhibit the ‘Sderot Express,” so that Americans can see evidence of the daily threats to Sderot residents. They will be encouraged to contact Israeli consul general’s to express their dismay at the lack of defensive actions.

We hope to include in the proposed traveling exhibit something that can be used effectively as Lori Lowenthal Marcus has advocated – a portable Lifeshield shelter approved by the State of Israel for deployment. Funds have to be raised for providing these portable shelters.

But in the end it is the citizens of Israel who must rise up and say ‘enough’. Enough of the trauma for Sderot, enough of doing nothing to save endangered Jewish lives from Islamist terror. Israel must strike back and destroy the Kassem rocket threat so no more ‘sevra adom ‘ color red alerts sound and the Children of Sderot can smile again, run and laugh.